Category: Technology

let twitter die — please!

whbeebe1 Comment

So Elon Musk has decided to back out of a US$44 billion bid for Twitter, the MySpace of the 2020s. I am no fan of the Muskrat, especially in this instance. He went charging in like he really knew what he was dealing with in regards to Twitter. It turns out he never did, and he never will.

Twitter is long past redemption, having become a cesspool of toxic trolling and millions of bots, in spite of what Twitter leadership has said in the past, and continues to say. I find their assertion that they delete a million fake accounts per day on the platform as eye wateringly unbelievable. One million per day. Left unsaid is how many actually get through. No, I don’t believe that it’s only 5%.

While I still have a very small Twitter account, I’ve stopped checking on a regular basis (regular being once/week or so for me) because Twitter decided to send me a notification every time any of the accounts I followed sent out a tweet. I got flooded with those damn notifications. I tried in vain to slow it down with checking not interested, not interested… But it seemed to do no good. Now it looks like I’m no longer getting those notifications, which means that either the “training” finally worked, or somebody finally said turn off that feature. Another feature that drove me up the wall was when they wanted to become more Facebook-like by having the stories in my feed show up based on how popular they were, not in chronological order. Yes, I could set it back to chronological if I looked for the tiny little stars on the right corner of my feed (so logical!), except that when I went back it was reset to most popular. After a period of time it looked like it finally stuck to chronological.

Both of those changes were meant to “enhance engagement,” which was a way to try to hook you ever deeper into Twitter. There were other changes such as having suggestions of who else to follow pop up in my timeline. No thanks, those suggestions are based not on relevance so much as how controversial, which is just another way to stir up the masses. Every time one of those pops up I always click “not interested.” If I want to follow someone on Twitter I’ll go find them myself.

So let Twitter die. It absolutely should. As for the Muskrat, let him take the absolute maximum monetary hit legally possible. He also needs to eat as much crow as possible. Let his failure to follow through purchasing Twitter be an absolute feast of Twitter crow.

chromebook tweaks — font size

whbeebe3 Comments

As an old guy heading into 70, I’m beginning to deal with a decline in certain physical capabilities such as my vision. My vision has never been good; I’ve worn glasses since I was seven, and my nearsightedness is measured as 20/700 without correction. Even with correction I’m finding that it’s easier for me to read larger print than the “normal” sized print I’ve worked with for decades on a computer monitor.

As a consequence I’ve had to tweak the size of Chromebook fonts (at least in Chrome) to make them easier to read. The following tweak doesn’t work for everything, for example the WordPress web editor doesn’t seem to be affected. But Google Mail certainly responds nicely.

You get to Settings on a Chromebook just like you would with a regular Chrome browser on any other OS. Under Settings go to Appearance, and from there set the Font size to Large. This makes living with computer devices a bit easier. That, and devices with long battery life that don’t require they be permanently attached to a power brick.

I’ve become a big user of neofetch. I know it’s been out there forever it seems like, but ever since I finally paid attention to its use elsewhere I’ve installed it on all my Linux systems and use it diligently to capture key environmental statistics. Here I’ve installed and run it in my Chromebook’s Debian container.

It’s a bit interesting in my case. The older I get the more accepting I am of Linux, the more impatient I am with the flaws and outright lies of the commercial operating system vendors (Apple and Microsoft). I’m too old to believe the bullshit because I realize I’m not immortal and one day I won’t be here. So while I’m still here I’m using software that actually allows me to be as freely creative as possible. Emphasis on freedom, not free-as-in-beer.